Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 140184 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 701(@200wpm)___ 561(@250wpm)___ 467(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 140184 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 701(@200wpm)___ 561(@250wpm)___ 467(@300wpm)
There’s a cottony cushion underneath a couple of scraps of paper. That explains why the box is so light. There’s hardly anything in it.
The paper is folded in half. I glance up at him, still with a faint smile, but now a little confused. I’m hoping for an explanation.
He doesn’t give one, just waits for me to unfold the paper.
A gust of wind blows by, sucking my dress between my legs and blowing my hair in my face. I push it back, then unfold the paper and look at the one on top. It looks like a newspaper clipping.
My confusion deepens.
Jet turns on his phone’s flashlight feature and all the air is instantly sucked from my lungs.
It’s a picture of Larry. I drop it and the box it came in like they’re both on fire.
“What the fuck is this?”
He bends to grab the papers before they blow away, then he offers one back to me.
I don’t know what the hell it is or why the fuck he’s giving me a picture of that pig on my wedding night, but I don’t find it the least bit amusing.
“Read it,” he prods, still holding out the paper.
I glare at him, but snatch the paper out of his hand, anyway.
My stomach churns. I don’t like this at all, but he’s adamant, so I try to ignore the buzzing, oozy feeling in my brain and just read the article since seeing that worm’s face makes my skin crawl.
My eyes move across the first lines so fast, I miss what they’re saying and have to start over.
In loving memory…
Wait.
That’s what they say when people die.
Did he die? I’m hardly sad about it, but I am surprised. I don’t know exactly how old Larry was, but he was hardly an old man. Middle-aged.
Though I guess he didn’t live a healthy lifestyle. He and my mom partied a lot. Maybe he overdosed.
Less ragey about this still strange “gift” he’s giving me, I look up at Jet with a mild frown. “He died?”
The smile on his face is… odd.
A little spooky.
It’s probably just because we’re over on this abandoned part of the beach in the dark and he’s showing me an obituary. Even for Jet, that’s extremely weird.
“I wanted something a bit more fitting to his crime, a bit more draconian, but I couldn’t make it look like a murder. I know my dad or brother would have inflicted physical injury and left evidence behind like testosterone-driven idiots,” he says with a roll of his eyes, “but my way was smarter. Nobody murders anybody with necrotizing fasciitis.”
He says it like it’s an academic joke I should get and join in laughing at. Even on a normal day, I usually don’t get those, but it certainly goes over my head right now. My jaw is practically on the beach. “What…?”
“It’s not reliable enough,” he explains, realizing he’s talking to a person of only average intelligence and below average scientific expertise. “It’s difficult to deliberately give someone, and it doesn’t always kill a person even if they do get infected. I had back-up plans, of course, but it was my first choice of death for him—well, of the safe ones, anyway. I would’ve preferred something more gruesome, perhaps spreading peanut butter around his flaccid dick and then locking him in a trunk full of hungry rats. I had to play it safe, though. Obviously, that would be investigated as foul play. No one accidentally dips their dick in peanut butter and feeds it to rodents.”
Is he… saying what…?
I mean, yes, he’s definitely saying that…
Is he joking? This is an insane and strangely detailed joke…
“It wasn’t even hard, honestly. I had to drug him so he’d be out when I broke into his house—” He stops himself, shaking his head. “Anyway, you probably don’t care to hear the gory details. Do you?”
Feeling the blood drain from my face, I shake my head, unable to muster a single syllable.
He nods like that’s what he figured. “Suffice it to say, I got the job done. I did that one months ago. I wanted to tell you right away so you’d know he wasn’t out there anymore, but I decided to wait. I wanted to get you the set, and that would have ruined the surprise.”
“The… set?”
He holds up the other clipping that I dropped.
A sick feeling rocks my stomach.
Oh no. Jet, what did you do?
I grab the newspaper clipping with shaky hands and unfold it to see my mother’s picture. I feel a bit faint as I start to read it.
Tracey Marie Landers, 36, passed away in her home the evening of May 27…
Oh. My. God.
I want to look up at him, but I’m a little afraid to.
Logically, I tell myself this is the same guy who bought me a cat purse to make me smile and I definitely shouldn’t be worried, but he did haul me pretty far away from the restaurant to give me this “gift.”